Saturday, August 23, 2014

Even people who’ve never seen Silence
of the Lambs know that Hannibal Lecter knocks back human liver with fava
beans and chianti. This always struck me
as slightly tame for a super villain but I’ve never claimed to have much grasp
of the popular imagination.

I admit I’ve never read a word by Thomas Harris – author of the “source
material” - but I did just re-read Martin Amis’s review of Hannibal, the third novel in the series,
this one featuring the evil Mason Verger, which
somehow looks like an anagram. (Martin Amis is of course an anagram of Sam
Martini, a pseudonym I have been known to use once in a while).

Amis writes, “When the child cries, a nurse wipes the tears away and
puts 'the wet swatches in Mason’s martini glass, chilling in the playroom’s
refrigerator beside the orange juice and cokes.’ What a Terrible guy. What a terrible martini.”

Well yes, I totally agree with Martin here, but I know there are people
who like their martinis dirty, with a
splash of olive brine. Personally I’m far
you mean to pay good money for the leavings from a jar of olives, but if you’re
into that whole dirty thing then maybe salt tears would be just the ticket.

And here’s another martini-related thing:

Now, to be honest I’m not sure what’s going on here, whether the snake
is drinking the martini, which seems a little unlikely, or whether the snake is
being “milked” so that its venom goes into the drink. If the latter then OK, that’s a super-villain trick if ever I saw one.

Of course these days some people will put anything in a martini. Even Dita
Von Tease.

Monday, August 18, 2014

There’s a book, by Margaret Mason, titled No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for
Your Blog, essentially a series of “prompts” to make
your blog more interesting. I do think
there’s a amount of certain wisdom in that title, however I’ve recently become a
Facebook friend of Mitsuru Tabata, who in lives in Nerima, Tokyo, and is
currently second guitarist in the psychedelic Japanoise band Acid Mothers
Temple (the guys I want to play at my funeral).
He’s also a sometime member of The Boredoms and Zeni Geva. That’s him at the top of this post, a happy
soul as you can see, and yes that is a hamburger shirt. To be fair he doesn’t always look like that.

And the fact is, Japanophile that I
am (with some slightly half-baked plans to go to Japan early next year), I find I’m deeply fascinated
by what he has for lunch, and for dinner too.
Fortunately a fairly high percentage of Tabata-san’s Facebook posts
feature food, both home-cooked and eaten in restaurants.

Certainly some of the food he has at home looks
very much the way you’d expect Japanese home-cooked food to look: simple, elegant, exotic in a way but not at all
outlandish, and not at all the kind of thing you'd find in a western Japanese restaurant:

And here’s what he eats at his mother’s
house (not an acid mother necessarily), which looks even better: gorgeously stylish and appealing. She had me at "stewed smoked herring."

But then, who would think that a Japanese
noise guitarist would be eating spaghetti alla pomdoro for lunch?

Much less a BLT?

Tabata is evidently a great fan of curries, and we know that the Japanese do a good
curry, it having been taken there, I gather, by the British who imported it
from India. Wikipedia tells me that the Japanese
navy was introduced to curry by the British Royal Navy, and now every Friday is curry day in the Japan Maritime Self-Defense
Force. This may be true, but my dad was
in the Royal Navy and he’d have thrown himself overboard rather than eat curry.

In any case curry is now a thoroughly international
dish and so Tabatha eats in various curry houses in Japan. Some apparently have
more Indian influence than others. This
one looks like it could be had in any could English curry house.

This one less so:

But of course again it’s the
odd unexpected “fusion” food that really catches the eye, like this one:

Yes it’s easy to believe the Japanese
eat hamburger steaks with rice, but this one appears to be varnished with some
kind of glistening gravy and those two semicircles of carrot really do look out
of place.

Tabata is an international
touring musician, and one of his latest posts has him in Holland eating or at
least posing with, something called a Lucifer.

And finally he gets to England
and gets a curry, in Ramsgate, a place not known for its simplicity, elegance
and quiet exotic.

I sure hope that curry tastes
better than it looks. The English, they’re
so inscrutable.

Meanwhile, unconnected with Tabata-san,
the website rocketnews24 - “Bringing you yesterday’s news from Japan and Asia, today” - reviews
a restaurant called Maruhachi Sushi, located in
Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture. The most spectacular
item on the menu is something called Sexual Harassment Sushi. Yep, really. It looks like this:

It’s a single
octopus tentacle and blood cockle wrapped in seaweed. The reviewer, named Kuzo “liked the unique
combination of textures in the octopus and shellfish. The seaweed also had a
pure taste that was exquisite.” Hey, it takes more than that to sexually harrass anybody I know in the Psychogourmet set. But it does look wonderful.